Many mobile devices, such as mobile phones and tablet computing devices, include cameras that may be operated by a user to capture still or video images. Because many of such mobile devices are often designed to be relatively small and/or thin, it can be important to design the cameras or imaging systems to be used therein to be as thin as possible in order to maintain the low-profile of the device.
One way to make a camera thin is to decrease the focal length thereof, thereby widening the field of view. Wide field of view cameras, however, may have drawbacks in some applications because the resolution of a particular object in the object space decreases as the field of view of the camera increases.
Another method for making a thin camera, that increases the effective resolution of the lens and the pixel count as compared with traditional wide field of view cameras, is to use folded optics to maintain the thin form factor by adding more cameras with narrow field of view lenses. Such a system of multiple cameras can be considered an array camera. The images from each of the individual cameras in the array camera may be merged or combined together to form a composite image.
In these systems the alignment between the individual cameras in the array camera requires tight tolerances of the physical location of components in the system. Adding Optical Image Stability (OIS) methods to an array camera system or other type of camera system may increase the difficulty of maintaining these tolerances. OIS is particularly beneficial because many camera systems experience unsteadiness or jitter during image capture. This is especially true of the thin handheld devices discussed above. The methods and systems described herein show how one may implement OIS for an array camera system or other camera system in a thin form factor that can be used in the devices previously mentioned, while still maintaining the tight positional tolerances required for some camera systems.